The half-forgotten Hollywood movies that emerge to surprising audience interest on Netflix tend to be old, reliable genres that audiences may have taken for granted when studios made them more: star-driven romances, meat-and-potatoes action without superheroes or nice virtual babysitter family movies. The big Wall, an action-fantasy spectacle currently having a moment on the streaming service, is more like the kind of oddity Netflix might well have produced in its early days of courting profligate filmmakers. Instead, this Chinese-American co-production by acclaimed visual stylist Zhang Yimou was released in theaters around the world in 2016 and 2017, failing in many of them. (It posted decent but disappointing numbers in China, but good enough to triple its anemic gross in the United States.) Years later, star Matt Damon didn’t exactly defend the film, observing on Marc Maron’s podcast that he had a sinking and hopeless feeling while on set, witnessing the conflict between the filmmakers and Hollywood higher-ups.
Even if Damon had come to the film’s rescue, he could have been accused of positioning himself as a white savior; that was the accusation in 2017, when the film’s silliness and cross-cultural clumsiness didn’t cut it. It does not impress American critics. In that interview with Maron, Damon takes issue with that aspect of the film, comparing it to Dancing with Wolves either Avatarbut his comments about compromising Yimou’s vision indicate that perhaps The big Wall In any case, it is not a project worth defending.
That being said… maybe it is? The big Wall It seems unlikely that you will ever sit down with Hero either The House of Flying Daggers like Zhang Yimou’s best-known films in the West, but then again, none of them are monster movies where masses of cunning alien lizard-like creatures lay siege to the Great Wall of China. Damon and Pedro Pascal, before stardom, play a pair of 11th century European mercenaries in China who search for gunpowder and cross paths with the Nameless Order, a group of soldiers who defend the Great Wall from the creature attacks that occur every 60 years. At first, they conspire with a fellow European (Willem Dafoe) to escape with stolen gunpowder, but eventually William (Damon) is forced to help Lin Mae (Jing Tian) and her soldiers fight the beasts.
That William was labeled a white savior is funny in light of the actual movie, which, yes, probably owes a bit to characters like Avatar and Dancing with Wolves. But even more than those well-intentioned, if sometimes clumsy, narratives in which a white man learns the customs of a native group, The big Wall he sees William as a particularly strong cog within a machine. Specifically, the film is about Damon’s character learning to show respect and deference towards the pageantry and power of the Chinese military, something he shares with some of Yimou’s other action-adventure films. Scene after scene shows countless beautifully armed Chinese soldiers engaged in the glory of selfless combat; If the movie were less silly, it would only make it more effective as propaganda. (It still sounds that way, though it’s curious that the creatures are almost as unified and synchronized as their peerless Chinese enemies.)
These battle sequences are the heart of the film, not because they are particularly emotionally moving, but because Zhang Yimou directs hell out of them. The costumes, and the way Yimou photographs them, are stunning: bursts of bright blue and purple armor along with red arrows and waving flags in a setting that many action and fantasy directors would choose to mute with some combination of gunmetal gray and icy blue. . (Lin Mae’s outfit is cooler than 90% of the on-screen superhero costumes of the last decade.) The creatures themselves have a nice texture in shades of green, with perpetually red-tinged teeth and, admittedly, the CG that brings them. to life makes them seem more than a little rubbery, with a cartoonish lack of gravity to the endless hordes. To some extent, it’s more quantity than quality. But the colors and physiology of the creature’s design make up for the lack of photorealism, and there’s something dizzying about the way the film fuses the elegance of Yimou’s previous action films with the campiness of a Intense black-Level creature feature. In the big final battle, there’s an almost equal amount of gorgeous stained-glass rainbow lights and splatters of juicy green creature guts. Also, remove the long end credits and this movie is 91 minutes long.
In other words: What a picture! All glory to the costly waste! Since its release, films like The big Wall have fallen even further into oblivion: too strange for the big studios, too expensive for Netflix in its cost-cutting era, and not enough of a hit in China. It’s not necessarily a historic loss to deny the world more $150 million special effects movies designed to equally flatter audiences in the two countries whose corporations provided the money for the budget. But some of The big WallNetflix viewers may wish they had seen it on a bigger, flashier screen, and that the next big-screen show they see had almost as much colorful flair.
Jesse Hassenger@rockmarooned) is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. He is a regular contributor to The AV Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts on www.sportsalcohol.comalso.
